Following the old-school auteurist bump'n'grind of this year's Cannes, the timing was interesting for Guillermo del Toro to announce that he had seen the future of cinema. Interesting because his vision presented quite the contrast with the brand-name parade of Von Trier and Tarantino; because, with his ability to flit between muted Spanish civil-war ghost stories and big dumb comicbook spectaculars, Del Toro may just be the most accomplished straddler of the gulf between art and commerce in film today; and because, in truth, it's not always easy to find someone prepared to commit to the idea of cinema having a future at all.

The details appeared in a recent interview with Wired, the good news about the coming age being that it will, apparently, deliver the long-overdue death blow to the hackneyed rules of cinematic storytelling, with a new era of boundless creativity taking its place. The less good news is where Del Toro sees this revolution arising from: the realm of videogames, with the PlayStation 3 acting as the "Model T" that will enable the folding of film, TV, games and print into one vast, long-form, democratically-fuelled "public story engine" – latter-day sagas, tailored to and by each of us who care to take part.

You will, I hope, forgive me a small scepticism. Without wanting to party poop, I can't help reading all this without snagging on the gulf between thrilling theory and somewhat drab practice. Game technology has, after all, been sniffed around by the film business for some years as a potential new dawn; yet its influence thus far has been confined to the most car-go-boom cartoonish of action movies, taking the form of literal-minded borrowings (witness the endless cycle of running, shooting, shagging, and running some more in the delirious Crank) rather than a step change in the very way we experience movies. Save the odd half-glimpse in Del Toro's own Pan's Labyrinth, the finest films of recent years have had as little to do with "single platform" futurism as did Keaton or Murnau. They have, in short, been films, and films alone.

And in fact, at the same time as games have been busy taking over the world, the movie blockbuster has only become more monolithic as, in the likes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Harry Potter series, each slab-like master text is treated like stone tablets by their fans (and by necessity their adaptors). Del Toro might foresee us all rushing forth to take up roles in our own fantasies – but the most commercially bone-crushing films of the last decade have been CGI-filled homages to beloved all-powerful single authors.

Which is a shame, because the ideas Del Toro is touting here are golden: an end to the top-down reign of bored LA scriptwriters, replaced with the energy of a zillion co-contributors, the rigid tyranny of the three-act structure redundant in the face of countless random flights of fancy. The kind of thing, in other words, sure to appeal to a certain kind of intellectually curious and forward-looking director: much like Del Toro or, indeed, David Cronenberg, whose fascination with interactivity in its most outré forms was last expressed in the playful eXistenZ, a film that foresaw the triumph of a wildly immersive gaming culture that would soon leave cinema as we know it for dead.

Only that hasn't happened; for at least some of us, film remains the benchmark. Partly that's to do with the alienating culture of games and gaming ("shooting people and running over old ladies," as Del Toro puts it). But the sticking point is still deeper: it's the difference between letting yourself be seduced by moods and ideas and wanting to control them, between patiently observing characters and them becoming mere supporting players in your own narrative – between, at heart, wanting to learn about the world and demanding you be at the centre of it. All told, it's one revolution from which I'll have to be excused.